This invention relates to ammunition sabots and particularly to a disintegrating sabot.
"Small caliber" as used herein means 0.50" caliber and below. The state of the art in plastic small caliber sabots has basically remained static since the development of the plastic sabot for hunting ammunition shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,164,092, issued Jan. 5, 1965, to D. S. Reed et al and assigned to Remington Arms Co., Inc. and which relates to the well-known Remington "Accelerator" hunting cartridge which uses a lead bullet in a polycarbonate sabot.
There is a constant desire to increase the speed, hardness, and density of lightweight subcaliber rifle bullets so that they will penetrate harder and thicker targets. However, it has not been known how to do this in conventional rifles due to the denser bullet materials that are required and the inability of existing sabots such as that taught by the Reed et al patent above to withstand the forces imposed by such launches of subcaliber projectiles having higher sectional density and hardness than the soft lead hunting bullets taught by the Reed et al patent.
The present invention provides a solution to this problem by providing an ammunition sabot which is strong enough to exit a rifled barrel in one piece at peak chamber pressures in excess of 70,000 copper crusher units of pressure (C.U.P.) while carrying a tungsten or tungsten carbide penetrator and then immediately disintegrate so that it doesn't thereafter slow down the projectile or make the projectile inaccurate. In the present invention, this is accomplished by use of a special sabot material and/or a special sabot design.